Sustainability

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Transcript of Sustainability

Are we living in a sustainable world?what is sustainability and how does it affect us at a local, regional, national and global level?design by Dóri Sirály for PreziMake a list in your books about what makes a good city.

We will then put all ideas into a class list, this class list will be the basis of your title page.

Your title page will be marked by this criteria

What are your ideas about what our new topic is about?what makes a city a good place to liveRemember all those words we used to describe what a good city was?What is this picture about?Term 3: Is it Sustainable?SustainabilityThrough this module we will be looking at a number of aspects that need to be considered when thinking about sustainability. These are:Environmental Sustainability- ability to maintain rates of renewable resources, pollution creation, and non-renewable resource depletion that can be continued indefinitelySocial Sustainability - the ability of a community to develop processes and structures which not only meet the needs of its current members but also support the ability of future generations to maintain a healthy community.Economic sustainability - is the ability to support a defined level of economic production indefinitely.Cultural Sustainability- the sharing of attitudes and values that represent diverse ways of viewing the world.

This term we are thinking about cities and how we live in them. Could it be, that in a changing world, cities will need to be radically different in the future.and of course "in the future" means by the time you are 30, not when you are 100Remember when we made a list of what makes a city a good place to live?

We made a list individually then as a class;

Lets quickly relook at that. We will be needing it later in this unit.Title page: Is it sustainable?WarmTitle page consists of pictures or words that show the list of what makes a good cityHotTitle page consists of pictures and words that show the list of what makes a good cityScorchingTitle page consists of pictures and words that show what makes a good city and includes specific Nelson examplesPlenary:Discuss with your neighbour............

If you had the resources (money, labour etc) to change 1 thing about Nelson, what would that be?

(e.g. add/build or get rid of something)

STARTER:What are 3 problems for Christchurch because of the earthquake?What are 3 opportunities the city now has?The photo below shows Christchurch's CBD (central business district) with 1300 buildings demolished in preparation for the rebuild of the city.L.O's:All will be able to list examples of what CHCH residents want for their city Most will be able to determine categories for what CHCH residents want for their citySome

will explain whether they agree with how Christchurch residents have prioritised what they want for their cityOur next section is on what do Christchurch residents want for their new city?Here is what all of the main ideas looked like at the endChristchurch in 2040?Do the following:Draw a four column tableMatch the coloured labels to columnsAND put the labels in order of size, biggest goes at the topOnce you've done this figure out what would be a good title for each column based on what's in each column's liste.g.Green labelsPurple labelsYellowBlueMixed use buildingsDay night marketsBiggest blue boxNext biggest??Extension: do you agree with the things Christchurch residents want the most and least for their city? Give examples from the table to explain your opinion.Share an Idea was a way for the public to tell their ideas about how the Christchurch Central City should be redeveloped to be a great place again.A Community Expo started the Share an Idea initiative in May 2011. For six weeks in May and June they gathered people’s ideas for the Central City. These ideas were brought together to help inform the draft Central City Plan as a broadly agreed structure and direction for the Central CityAfter the Christchurch earthquakes, the council asked the people of Christchurch how they wanted their city to look when it was rebuilt. Some kids also gave their ideas.How about starting from a blank canvas to begin a new city.....Christchurch has this opportunity.What is your Ecological Footprint?Your Ecological Footprint estimates the area of land and ocean required to support your consumption of food, goods, services, housing, and energy and how you process your wastes. Your ecological footprint is expressed in "global acres". Your footprint is broken down into four consumption categories: carbon (home energy use and transportation), food, housing, and goods and services.For homework I want you to find out your personal ecological footprint. We will look at it tomorrow. But first let us have a look into the past.........To see just how clearly a growing human population relies on and impacts its natural environment, one need look no further than Easter Island.Easter IslandThe Mystery of Easter IslandEaster Island is a small 63-square-mile patch of volcanic land — more than a thousand miles from the next inhabited spot in the Pacific Ocean. In A.D. 1200 (or thereabouts), a small group of Polynesians — it might have been a single family — made their way there, settled in and began to farm. When they arrived, the place was covered with trees — as many as 16 million of them, some towering 100 feet high.Lets check it out on Google Earth!Geographer John Flenley and Archeologist Paul Bahn write in The Enigmas of Easter Island,"it is a story with an urgent and sobering message for our own times."

As Jared Diamond tells it in his book, Collapse, Easter Island is the "clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources." Once tree clearing started, it didn't stop until the whole forest was gone. Diamond called this self-destructive behavior "ecocide" and warned that Easter Island's fate could one day be our own.A few hundred years later Easter Island had no people living on it and no trees. All that had been left behind were giant stone statues called Moai , evidence that people once lived there. So what happened to this civilization?Before we investigate lets look at the story of how Easter Island was populated.Ovahe Beach, North Shore This sheltered sand beach is close to Anakena, where the legends say King Hoto Matua landed his double hulled canoe, thus beginning the occupation of Easter Island.

It is at Anakena that the legends say Hotu Matua landed and began the colonization of the island. Excavations of this area have discovered that it was an important site and it boasts one of the best collections of erected moai on the island, Ahu NaunauThe voyagers started constructing villages and houses made in an unusual elliptical shape. It has been speculated that this style of construction started when the new arrivals turned their boats upside down for quick housing. There were literally hundreds of remains of these foundations on the island in the 1800's, but most were destroyed by the missionaries to make fences.

Indeed, the missionaries did more damage to the island's history than even the Peruvian slave traders, which carted off most of the island's population. Those who escaped by hiding in the island's many caves were "saved" by these missionaries, who proceeded to destroy all the islanders' wooden sculptures, religious artifacts and most importantly, the Rongo-Rongo tablets, which contained a record of the lost language of the Rapa Nui.

Remember the first islanders found a lush island, filled with giant palms which they used to build boats and housing. The plants they brought with them did well in the rich volcanic soil and by AD 1550 population on the island hit a high of between 7000 and 9000.

Distinct clans formed as the population increased and various population centers grew up in different areas of the island. One thing tied them all together however — the statue construction and the cult that formed around it.

The soft volcanic rock was perfect material for statue carving. Using harder volcanic rock implements they were able to first sketch out the moai's outline in the rock wall and then chip away at it until the moai was held in place by a thin "keel."

Once the statues were reasonably complete, they then had to be transported across the island to the platforms prepared for them. This involved a trek of 14 miles in some cases. How were these massive Moai moved to the sites?

There are many different theories;Researchers Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo test a new theory that suggests how ancient Easter Islanders may have used ropes to "walk" the moai to their platforms.http://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/phy03.sci.phys.energy.moai/levers-raising-the-moai-on-easter-island/ In this video segment adapted from NOVA, a team of archaeologists and engineers tests one theory of how the ancient peoples of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) might have transported a massive statue, called a moai, from cliff-top quarry to coastal perch and then raised it to an upright position. Levers are simple machines that can help amplify lifting force. As the scientists and local participants discover, even with the mechanical advantage of a lever, the challenge is decidedly difficult and extremely time-consuming.

Once the journey was complete the Moai were positioned atop great platforms called ahu. Built at the edge of the ocean, the ahu required just as much engineering know-how and raw labor as the statue construction itself. It is here that the Easter Islanders' stonework skills can fully be appreciated.

Soon ahu with erected moai were installed on all corners of the island, until over one thousand had been carved, and the population of the island also continued to grow. For decades the competition to build the biggest and best moai went on, and different ahu - each belonging to a different clan - formed an almost unbroken line along the coast of Easter Island. The culture had reached its zenith. And then something went terribly wrong . . . A chilling story of resource exploitation and destruction on Easter Island is beginning to come to light. The first westerners to discover the island wondered how any one could have survived on such a desolate, treeless place. Indeed, this was a mystery until recent core samples taken from the crater lakes showed that the island was heavily forested with a giant now-extinct palm while the Easter Island culture was active.

When the islanders were greeted with a lush tropical paradise it must have seemed inexhaustible. The trees were cut for lumber for housing, wood for fires, and eventually for the rollers and lever-like devices used to move and erect the moai.

As the deforestation continued the moai building competition turned into an obsession. The quarry was producing moai at sizes that probably could never have been moved very far (one unfinished moai in the quarry is 70 feet tall!) And still the trees came down. With the loss of the forests, the land began to erode. The small amount of topsoil quickly washed into the sea. The crops began to fail and the clans turned on one another in a battle for the scarce resources. The symbols of the islanders' power and success, the moai, were toppled. Eyes were smashed out of the moai and often rocks were placed where the statues neck would fall so it would decapitate the moai. The violence grew worse and worse. It was said that the victors would eat their dead enemies to gain strength, bones found on the island show evidence of this cannibalism. With the scarce food supplies it may have been a question of hunger as well as being ceremonial. A spooky cave (below) at the southwest corner of the island, Ana Kai Tangata, is translated to "cave where men are eaten." Inside are pictographs painted in ochre and white of ghost like birds flying upwards. With no wood left to build boats, all the Rapa Nui people could do was look enviously at the birds that sail effortless through the sky. The Rapa Nui culture and community, which had developed Their island was in shambles, and their villages and crops destroyed. There was no wood left on the island to build escape boats. The few survivors of the conflict, perhaps numbering as low as 750, began to pick up the pieces of their culture. One thing they left behind, however, were the moai.... lets recap with mystery cardsA documentaryIt is unclear why the Easter Islanders turned to statue construction on such a massive scale. Their obsession with it ultimately brought about their downfall as they depleted more and more of the forests for use in the process of moving the giant moai. While the why is a mystery, where it happened and to a large degree how it happened is fairly clear. The moai carvers were master craftsmen. The production of the statues was most likely through conscripted labor with many rituals and ceremonies performed throughout the process.Finally when a statue was finished, it was broken off its keel and slid carefully down the slope using ropes tied to giant palm trunks which were sunk in specially prepared holes in rim of the crater. . Preparation was then made for transport across the island to various ahu.It is believed that the statues were commissioned commemorative images of lineage heads. However, the moai are not portraits of specific individuals although some may have inscriptions or other markings that linked them with specific chiefs. Why they chose the stylized design of the angular face and long shaped bodies is unclear and is one of the greatest mysteries of the Rapa Nui.The ahu were the ceremonial platforms built to support collections of moai. As evidence of the difficulty moving the moai, many can be seen along the paths of ancient roadways where they broke along the way and were abandoned.

Eventually all pure Rapa Nui blood died out. The attachment with Chile brought new influences, and today there are only a few individuals left with ties to the original population. The Easter Islanders were more cut off from the world then ever before. Any dreams of escaping the destroyed island were dashed by the lack of wood. The only boats they could build were small rafts and canoes made of tortoro reeds. Even fishing must have become extremely difficult at this point. The island was a wasteland, the eroded soil just barely producing enough food for the meager population to survive. It was under these conditions that the Birdman Cult arose.It's possible that the Birdman practices had been going on during the reign of the statue cult; however, it eventually took over as the predominate religion on the island and was still in practice up until 1866-67. High on the rim of a crater known as Rano Kau was the ceremonial village of Orongo. Built to worship the god of fertility, Makemake, it became the site of a grueling competition.Each year leadership of the island was determined by the individual who could scale down the vertical slopes, swim out to one of three small islets in shark-infested waters, and bring back the egg of the nesting sooty tern unbroken. The one who did this successfully was considered the Birdman of the year and was bestowed with special honors and privileges.One of the most fascinating sights at Orongo are the hundreds of petroglyphs carved with birdman images. Carved into solid basalt, they have resisted ages of harsh weather. It has been suggested that the images represent birdman competition winners. Over 480 Birdman petroglyphs have been found on the island, mostly around Orongo.over the past 300 years, collapsed.

As Birdman images transformed the rocks, so too were the islanders transformed. It seemed that the culture was beginning to rebuild itself. Although we will never know whether the Rapa Nui would have survived and prospered, because in 1862 wave after wave of slave traders landed on Easter Island and took away all healthy individuals. In the space of one year, a level of injury, death and disease was inflicted on the population leaving the people broken and bereft of leadership. As their culture lay in disarray a new force entered the scene whose actions would forever deny the world of a true understanding of the Rapa Nui culture.The missionaries arrived on Easter Island when the people were at their most vulnerable. With their society in ruins it did not take long to convert the population to Christianity. First to go was the islanders style of dress, or lack thereof. Tattooing and use of body paint were banned. Destruction of Rapa Nui artworks, buildings, and sacred objects, including most of the Rongo-rongo tablets - the key to understanding their history - was swift and complete. Islanders were forced off their ancestral lands and required to live in one small section of the island while the rest of the land was used for ranching.A Lesson from the Past

On an island as small as Easter, it was easy to see the effects of the deforestation as it was taking place. But the inhabitants continued their destructive actions. They probably prayed to their gods to replenish the land so they could continue to rape it, but the gods didn't answer. And still the trees came down. Whatever one did to alter that ecosystem, the results were reasonably predictable. One could stand on the summit and see almost every point on the island. The person who felled the last tree could see that it was the last tree. Nonetheless, he (or she) still felled it.* This is the really scary part. As our own forests fall to the bulldozers, there are many who are valiantly trying to save them. It is obvious, now that we have satellites showing us the massive deforestation, that there is a serious problem. And yet our leaders — and even the majority of individuals — look on, unconcerned. They appear willing to bulldoze the last trees to build the moai of our time — technology & development. Will we have the sense to reconcile our lifestyles with the well-being of our environment, or is the human personality always the same — as that of the person who felled the last tree?*

A jewel of an island floating in an endless sea. A seemingly never-ending supply of raw materials. Technological advances. Population growth. Depletion of resources. War. Collapse. Sound familiar? The Easter Island story is a story for our times. We too are on an island floating on an endless sea. There are differences, of course. It could be said that Easter Island is tiny and that it was only a matter of time before the resources in such a closed system were used up. But you could say that there are parallels between the islanders' attitude towards their environment and our own.Can Easter Island be seen as a smaller version of our planet today? Should we regard its tragic collapse as a cautionary tale of the utmost gravity?

One can stand on the summit of Easter Island and see almost every point on the island.

So ask yourself this question "What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?” Another theory on the collapse of the civilisation of Easter IslandThere has been new evidence that human beings may not have been responsible for the destruction of Easter Island. Although Easter Island has long been held to be the most important example of a traditional society destroying itself, it appears that the real culprits were rats - up to three million of them.The trees did die, no question. But instead of fire and timber usage two anthropologists, Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo, from the University of Hawaii, blame rats.Polynesian rats (Rattus exulans) stowed away on those canoes, Hunt and Lipo say, and once they landed, with no enemies and lots of palm roots to eat, they went on a binge, eating and destroying tree after tree, and multiplying at a furious rate.

Scientists say that Easter Island skeletons from that time show "less malnutrition than people in Europe." When Dutch explorer, Jacob Roggevin, happened by in 1722, he wrote that islanders didn't ask for food. They wanted European hats instead. And, of course, starving folks typically don't have the time or energy to carve and shove 70-ton statues around their islandIn laboratory settings, Polynesian rat populations can double in 47 days. Throw a breeding pair into an island with no predators and abundant food and arithmetic suggests the result ... If the animals multiplied as they did in Hawaii, the authors calculate, [Easter Island] would quickly have housed between two and three million. Among the favorite food sources of R. exulans are tree seeds and tree sprouts. Humans surely cleared some of the forest, but the real damage would have come from the rats that prevented new growth.As the trees went, so did 20 other forest plants, six land birds and several sea birds. So there was definitely less choice in food, a much narrower diet, and yet people continued to live on Easter Island, and food, it seems, was not their big problem.For one thing, they could eat rats. Archeologists examined ancient garbage heaps on Easter Island looking for discarded bones and found "that 60 percent of the bones came from introduced rats."The Hawaiian anthropologists claim that clans and families on Easter Island didn't fall apart. It's true, the island became desolate, emptier and the ecosystem was severely compromised. Yet Easter Islanders didn't disappear. They adjusted. They had no lumber to build canoes to go deep-sea fishing. They had fewer birds to hunt. They didn't have coconuts. But they kept going on rat meat and small helpings of vegetables. They made do.

Instead of the last tree being cut down rats may have eaten the last seeds.HoweverHumans are a very adaptable species. We've seen people grow use to slums, adjust to concentration camps, learn to live with what fate hands them. If our future is to continuously degrade our planet, lose plant after plant, animal after animal, forgetting what we once enjoyed, adjusting to lesser circumstances, never shouting, "That's It!" — always making do, what will happen.So what do we take away from this?Here is a story about TangIt's like the story people used to tell about Tang, a sad, flat synthetic orange juice popularized by NASA. If you know what real orange juice tastes like, Tang is no achievement. But if you are on a 50-year voyage and if you lose the memory of real orange juice, then gradually, you begin to think Tang is delicious.

On Easter Island, people learned to live with less and forgot what it was like to have more. Maybe that will happen to us. There's a lesson here.TASK

Arts and CraftsCreate your own MaoiThink about what the Moai represented to the Rapanui people.You have one lessonSTARTER:CITIESInstructions: come up with a word related to our last lesson that starts with each of the letters (or has the letter in the word)This lesson: Comparing views on what a good place to live isL.O's:All will be able to find similarities between our class' idea of a good city and Christchurch's planMost will be able to provide examples of where Nelson as a city shows different key conceptsSome will be able to compare and contrast Nelson and Christchurch in how they show our key conceptsThis week you have seen two plans for future citiesYour class idea of a good city, andWhat the people of Christchurch think is a good cityForm ClassChristchurchLet's compare plans in a Venn DiagramOf course, other people have ideas about what a good city to live in looks like, and they think it has eight parts that are all equally importantConcept wheel: Complete 1 or more of the tasks belowHOT:For 6 pieces of the pie, write examples from Nelson and Christchurch.Scorching:

'The Christchurch plan has got all of the pieces of the pie covered'. To what extent do you agree with this? Give examples to explain.WARM:For 4 pieces of the pie, write 2 examples from NelsonHint: think about what your government provides and what services are provided e.g swimming pools, libraries, recycling and rubbish pick up.If this is what people want, why don't they have it?Plenary: in pairs, discuss the question below